FISHING IN THE DARK
As anyone who’s ever drunk too much will also know, alcohol has
a complicated relationship to sleep. Its initial effect is sedative: the
slumpy somnolence most of us are familiar with. But alcohol also
disrupts sleep patterns and reduces sleep quality, limiting and postponing
the amount of time spent in the restorative waters of REM, where
the body both physically and psychologically replenishes itself. This
explains why sleep after a wild night is so often shallow and broken
into pieces.
Chronic drinking causes more permanent disturbances in what’s
known prettily as the sleep circuitry: damage that can persist long after
sobriety has been attained. According to a paper by Kirk Brower
entitled ‘Alcohol’s Effects on Sleep in Alcoholics’, sleep problems are
more common among alcoholics than the population at large. What’s
more, ‘sleep problems may predispose some people to developing
alcohol problems’, and are in addition often implicated in relapse.
Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway suffered from
insomnia, and their writing on the subject is full of submerged clues
about their drinking. The two men first met in May 1925 in the
Dingo American Bar on the Rue Delambre in Paris, when Fitzgerald
was twenty-eight and Hemingway was twenty-five. At the time,
Fitzgerald was one of America’s best known and best paid short story
writers. He was the author of three novels, This Side of Paradise, The
Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, which had been
published a few weeks before. A pretty man, with neat little teeth and
unmistakably Irish features, he’d been careering around Europe with
his wife Zelda and their small daughter Scottie. ‘Zelda painting, me
drinking,’ he recorded in his Ledger for the month of April, adding in
June: ‘1000 parties and no work.’
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In a way, the bingeing shouldn’t have mattered. He’d just finished
Gatsby, after all; that perfectly weighted novel. Its great strength is its
indelibility: the way it enters into you, leaving a trail of images like
things seen from a moving car. Jordan’s hand, lightly powdered over
her tan. Gatsby flinging out armfuls of shirts for Daisy to look at: a
mounting pile of apple green and coral and pale orange, monogrammed
in blue. People drifting in and out of parties, or riding away on horseback, leaving behind some lingering suggestion of a snub. A little dog
sneezing in a smoky room and a woman bleeding fluently on to a
tapestried couch. The owl-eyed man in the library, and Gatsby’s list of
self-improvements, and Daisy being too hot and saying in her lovely
throaty voice that she hopes her daughter will be a beautiful little
fool. The green light winking, and Gatsby calling Nick old sport, and
Nick thinking of catching the train back to St. Paul and seeing the
shadows of holly wreaths cast on to the snow.
A different man could have survived a blowout after building something as lovely and as durable as that. But Fitzgerald was too unanchored
to be able to tolerate his chosen pace of life. For years, he and Zelda
had been reeling hectically around the globe, ricocheting from New
York to St. Paul, to Great Neck, to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, trailing
wreckage in their wake. Just before he’d arrived in Paris there’d been
a particularly troublesome spell. Zelda had an affair with a French
aviator and was becoming very strange, while Fitzgerald was drinking
heavily and getting into fights, at one point ending up in a Roman
jail, a scene he’d later use to mark Dick Diver’s definitive loss of control
in Tender is the Night, the novel he’d just begun.
As for Hemingway, he was knee-deep in what he’d later remember
as the happiest period of his life. He was married to Hadley Richardson,
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his first wife, and had a small son he nicknamed Mr. Bumby. There’s
a photograph of him taken around that time, in a thick sweater, shirt
and tie, looking a little chubby. He has a new moustache, but it doesn’t
quite disguise the boyish softness of his face. Three years back, in 1922,
Hadley had accidentally lost a suitcase containing all his manuscripts,
and so the book of stories he’d just published, In Our Time, represented
entirely new material, or at the least new versions of lost originals.
The two men liked one another immediately. You can tell from
even the most casual glance through their letters, which are stuffed
with good-natured insults and statements as frankly loving as: ‘I can’t
tell you how much your friendship has meant to me’ and ‘My god
I’d like to see you’. As well as being good company, Fitzgerald was
also of professional assistance to Hemingway that year. Before they’d
even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max
Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young man. In a
letter to Perkins written a few weeks after their first meeting in the
Dingo, Hemingway noted that he was seeing a lot of Scott, adding
enthusiastically: ‘We had a great trip together driving his car up from
Lyon.’
The next summer Fitzgerald helped out again, this time by casting
a critical eye over Hemingway’s new novel, The Sun Also Rises. In a
characteristically insightful and badly spelled letter, he suggested that
the first twenty-nine pages (full of ‘sneers, superiorities and nosethumbings-at-nothing . . . elephantine facetiousness’) be cut, though
in the end Hemingway could only bring himself to dispense with
fifteen. ‘You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe,’ he
adds, to soften the blow, before confessing a few lines on: ‘I go crazy
when people aren’t always at their best.’
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At the time this letter was written, Hemingway had got himself
into a fix. He’d fallen in love with a wealthy, boyishly attractive
American, Pauline Pfeiffer. Over the course of the summer (in which
he, Hadley and Pauline holidayed together in Fitzgerald’s old villa in
Juan-les-Pins), it became increasingly clear that his marriage was
finished. ‘Our life is all gone to hell,’ he wrote to Scott on 7 September.
He spent a suicidal autumn alone in Paris, was divorced from Hadley
on 27 January 1927 and by spring had resolved to marry Pauline.
During the course of the break-up he suffered punishing insomnia.
In the same 7 September letter, he used the word hell a second time
to describe his condition ever since meeting Pauline, adding:
. . . with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could
study the terrain I get sort of used to it and fond of it and
probably would take pleasure in showing people around it. As
we make our hell we certainly should like it.
Insomnia as a light to view a hellish terrain.The idea evidently appealed
to him, because it reoccurs as the foundation of a story he wrote soon
after. A long time back, before he’d met even Hadley, Hemingway had
served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy in the First World
War. While bringing chocolate to the soldiers on the front, he’d been
blown up by mortar fire and had spent a long time in hospital with
a badly damaged leg. In November 1926, he wrote a story inspired
by this experience, though it ranged out much further than that.
‘Now I Lay Me’ begins with Nick Adams (not Hemingway exactly,
but rather a kind of stand-in self or avatar, who shares various items of
his childhood and wartime record) lying on the floor of a room at night,
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trying not to sleep. As he lies there, he listens to silkworms feeding on
mulberry leaves. ‘I myself did not want to sleep,’ he explains, ‘because I
had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut
my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my
body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown
up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back.’
To ward off this terrifying eventuality, he carries out a nightly ritual.
Lying in the dark, listening to the small noises of feeding from above,
he fishes very carefully in his mind the rivers he knew as a boy: the
trout rivers of Michigan, with their deep pools and swift, shallow
stretches. Sometimes he finds grasshoppers in the open meadows, and
uses them for bait, and at other times he collects wood ticks or beetles
or white grubs with brown heads, and once a salamander, though that’s
not an experiment he repeats. Sometimes, too, the rivers are imaginary,
and these can be very exciting, and easily carry him through to dawn.
These fishing adventures are so detailed it’s often hard to remember
that they aren’t real; that they’re fictional even inside the fiction: a story
a man is telling himself in secret, a manufactured substitute for the sort
of wayward, nocturnal journeys he might otherwise be making.
On this particular night – the night of the silkworms in the mulberry
leaves – there’s only one other person in the room, and he too is
incapable of sleep. Both are soldiers, in Italy in the First World War.
Nick is American, and the other man has lived in Chicago, though
he’s Italian by birth. Lying there in the dark they get to talking, and
John asks Nick why he never sleeps (though actually he can manage
just fine when there’s a light on, or after the sun has risen). ‘I got in
pretty bad shape along early last spring, and at night it bothers me,’
he says casually and that’s all the explanation he offers, except for the
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mention of being blown up at night at the very beginning of the
story. Instead, the weight of his injury is carried by those dream rivers,
its severity only really gaugeable by the enormous efforts he makes
to circumvent it. He’s certainly not going to tell the reader directly
how bad it feels to lie there, thinking you might die at any minute.
Fitzgerald’s own take on the hells of sleeplessness came seven years
later, with an essay called ‘Sleeping and Waking’. It ran in Esquire in
December 1934, when he was careering into the breakdown he’d confess
to eighteen months later in ‘The Crack-up’, a much more famous trio
of essays for the same magazine. At the time of writing, Fitzgerald was
living in Baltimore with his daughter. His wife was in a mental institution, he was drinking heavily, and the days of being carefree in Paris
and the Riviera had vanished as conclusively as they did for poor Dick
Diver in Tender is the Night – though you could argue that they’d only
been carefree in the sense that a man on a tightrope is carefree, softshoeing along without the slightest sign of strain or effort.
Writing in praise of Fitzgerald years later, John Cheever observed
that his genius lies in the provision of details. Clothes, dialogue, drinks,
hotels, incidental music: all are precisely rendered, plunging the reader
into the lost world of the Riviera or West Egg or Hollywood or
wherever it is we are. The same is true in this essay, though it’s by no
means the most glamorous of his stage sets. Aside from one brief visit
to a New York hotel room, the drama is confined to the bedroom of
the author’s own house in Baltimore, with small forays out into the
study and the porch.
In this room he suffers what might be described as a rupture in
the fabric of sleep, a widening interval of wakefulness between the
first easy plunge into unconsciousness and the deep rest that comes
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after the sky has begun to lighten. This is the moment, he declares in
grand and untranslated Latin, that’s referred to in the Psalms as ‘Scuto
circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta
volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris’, which means: ‘His
truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the
terror of the night, of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business
that walketh about in the dark.’
Things that flieth are certainly part of the problem. If Nick Adams’s
difficulties with sleep are, as we’re asked to assume, the result of
shellshock – a manly, even heroic reason for developing such a childish
ailment as fear of the dark – Fitzgerald by contrast emphasises the
absurd smallness of his inciting incident. His insomnia, according at
any rate to this deposition, began in a New York hotel room two years
previously, when he was attacked by a mosquito. The ridiculousness
of this assailant, its comic insignificance, is emphasised by a preceding
anecdote, about a friend whose own chronic case of sleeplessness began
after being bitten by a mouse. Perhaps both are simply true stories,
but I can’t help feeling they represent an odd kind of minimisation
that Fitzgerald seems compelled to repeat.
If the mosquito incident took place in 1932, then it occurred during
a profound downturn in the Fitzgeralds’ fortunes. In February Zelda
had her second breakdown (the first took place in 1930) and was
hospitalised in Baltimore at the Henry Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins
University. There she produced a novel, Save Me the Waltz, which used
so much of the same material as Tender is the Night, the book Fitzgerald
had been working on increasingly frantically for the past seven years,
that he wrote to her psychiatrist in a fury, demanding extensive deletions and revisions.
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Later that spring he rented La Paix, a big rambling house a little
out of town, with a garden full of dogwoods and black gums. Zelda
came home in the summer, at first on day release, but they argued
increasingly bitterly and in June 1933 she accidentally set the house
on fire while burning some clothes or papers in an unused fireplace
(an incident, funnily enough, that Tennessee Williams didn’t use in
Clothes for a Summer Hotel, his portent-obsessed, fire-obsessed play
about the Fitzgeralds). ‘THE FIRE,’ Fitzgerald wrote in his Ledger,
adding ‘1st borrowing from Mother. Other borrowings.’
They had to move, though Scott insisted they stay on in the smokestained house for another few months until he had at long last finished
his novel. In the beginning, it was called The Boy Who Killed His Mother
and was about a man called Francis who falls in with a glittering
group of expats and ends up going to pieces and murdering his mother.
For some reason Fitzgerald couldn’t make this alluring idea fly, and
his gruelling failures were at least partially responsible for the insufferable badness of his behaviour at the time.
Later, he realised the story he really wanted to tell was much less
fantastical. He turned the novel inside out and made it instead about
Dick and Nicole Diver, and how Dick saved his wife from madness
and in so doing destroyed himself. It’s structured like a see-saw, Nicole
rising up with her white crook’s eyes, and Dick sinking down into
alcoholism and nervous exhaustion, though he once boasted that he
was the only living American who possessed repose.
The worst of it comes in Rome, where he goes on a bender after
burying his father. He falls in with Rosemary, the young film star he
thought he loved, and somehow they get up too close and disappoint
each other. Bitter and confused, he goes out to get drunk, whirling
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in an immaculate progression of scenes through dances and conversations into arguments, fist-fights and at last to prison. Tender isn’t by
any means as coherent or as streamlined as Gatsby, but I can think of
very few books that choreograph a downward spiral with such elegant
and terrifying precision.
When it was finished, Fitzgerald went with his thirteen-year-old
daughter Scottie to a townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue, while Zelda
was institutionalised again, this time in the Shepherd Pratt Hospital,
where she tried to kill herself at least twice. Little wonder that he
described the period in his Ledger as ‘a strange year of work and drink.
Increasingly unhappy’, adding in pencil on a separate draft sheet: ‘Last
of real self-confidence.’ The long-awaited publication of Tender in April
1934 didn’t exactly help matters. It sold better than tends now to be
thought, but tenth on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list can hardly
be described as the summation of long-cherished dreams.
By November 1934, at around the time ‘Sleeping and Waking’ was
written, he made the seemingly frank admission to his editor, the
eternally loyal Max Perkins:‘I have drunk too much and that is certainly
slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know
whether I could have survived this time.’ This ambivalence, which
could be interpreted as a refusal to see alcohol as a cause rather than
a symptom of his troubles, is echoed several times in the essay itself.
At first he announces his insomnia to be the result of ‘a time of utter
exhaustion – too much work undertaken, interlocking circumstances
that made the work twice as arduous, illness within and around – the
old story of troubles never coming singly’. A paragraph or two later,
drink is dropped casually into the equation with the throwaway phrase,
‘I was drinking, intermittently but generously.’
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